[l1ambda]

Your post totally resonated with me, particularly how once you go metaprogramming everything is suddenly metaprogramming. I work at a Spring shop and we joke about how we should just be called Senior Java Annotators. I find it ironic that Spring does all this machinery in order to instantiate your application, yet often you end up needed to use the Order http://docs.spring.io/spring/docs/current/javadoc-api/org/sp... annotation anyway to get things to wire up in the right way...at which point, it is kind of like, what even is the point of using Spring then? We waste tons of time figuring out what is getting configured, injected, instantiated, etc. to the point where I'd rather just define everything myself in the order I need it, so I know exactly what I'm getting and why. I miss normal programming, normal debugging, and normal application initialization.

And then there is the problem of CGLib wrapping e.g. for @Transactional and other annotations. Of course, it only happens for other services calling into your wrapped service. If you call your own methods from within the service, you're hitting just the service instance, not the wrapped instance, which causes all sorts of headaches. Yet people still take this disaster further with Lombok/bytecode manipulation and aspects.

http://sparkjava.com/ looks very appealing; it looks very much like http://koajs.com/ which I really respect.

[strictfp]

Hey! A colleague who also sees the light! I've been pushing for more programmatic control in our apps due to the same problems you mention. I would actually consider myself one of the most versed in Spring at our shop. But while I see so many problems, many devs only see "the beauty of the minimal code". I wish I could understand what is blindsiding them from all the problems we have.

The latest incarnation of this problem is Spring Boot. It does some really far out stuff to your app, like making m separate metrics for each unique url of your webapp. That goes south pretty quickly. Not to mention how much longer the app takes to start, how much slower it is compared to coding the same functionality manually (x4), how much trouble people have getting the right mental model of how the app works (with instrumented transaction boundaries and stuff that you mention), how hard it is to debug (why did this endpoint return 404?) etc.

We did some POCs with vert.x and spark, and all of a sudden you see what type of overcomplicated mess we have been creating for ourselves.